


Secret

by Serai



Series: High Contrast [17]
Category: The Faculty (1998)
Genre: Bruises, Comfort, Humiliation, Lust, M/M, Mutual Masturbation, Oral Sex, Pain, Slash, pity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 05:57:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4553310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serai/pseuds/Serai





	Secret

.  
On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Casey pauses inside Zeke’s front door. He always pauses here for a moment, to take a breath, to try and steady himself, but it never works. Zeke slams the door shut with his foot or his hand, and backs Casey hard up against it, always the same way, as if he were initiating a ritual. Casey is instantly caught up and stops thinking about anything else, anything at all. From there it goes wherever it goes that afternoon.

But on this Friday, it doesn’t happen that way. Zeke pushes the heavy door gently with one hand, and it swings shut on its own. Then he backs Casey slowly up against the door without touching him, until he’s leaning back against the cool wood. Zeke looks down at him then, his gaze rapt. He doesn’t kiss Casey, but runs a finger along his lips, and takes in a slow breath when Casey’s tongue touches his fingertip.

In his room, Zeke moves Casey towards the bed, pulling away the layers he’s wearing one by one. Casey tries to resist, pushing his hands away, but Zeke leans in. “Shh,” he whispers, and licks Casey’s upper lip, then bites it. Casey stills, pressing his forehead fretfully into Zeke's shoulder, who slowly raises the last layer, a white tee.

Zeke’s shortness of breath is the only reaction he lets show as he looks at the angry red skin, and the bruises like purple roses blossoming in five hard-edged clusters along Casey’s side and back. He counts the colors, imagining the hands that did this fucking work - _meathooks,_ they used to call those kinds of hands - and wonders distantly how Casey survives this. How does he face the threat of this every day, for years? How have his ribs not snapped? His mind not broken? Even now, that familiar glimmer of fear has returned to his eyes, and Zeke doesn’t know how to make it go away, or if he even wants to. He wouldn’t be Casey if he wasn’t fighting off the fear, the threat. The fight makes him who he is. But who is he?

Zeke runs his fingertips gently over Casey’s back, over the hot skin, and feels him tensing up as his fingers approach the worst spots. He spreads his hand out and strokes Casey’s battered flesh with the barest touch, then kisses him, slow and deep. Casey whimpers and suddenly clutches at him, his blunt fingers digging into Zeke’s back. He pulls on Zeke’s shirt, “Take it off, I want to touch you,” and Zeke lets go of him to strip down fast. As soon as he’s naked, Casey is on him, pulling him down to his mouth, running a hand to his thighs. Zeke gasps when Casey takes hold of him and squeezes. He licks at Casey’s mouth, touches their tongues together, tastes the returning fervor. He takes hold of Casey’s hands and slowly presses him down onto his uninjured side, slipping his belt loose and undoing his jeans as Casey stretches out. As he pulls down, Casey winces, and Zeke immediately sees why: a sixth flower spreads its purple petals over his hip. Zeke’s breath shakes at the sight, at the viciousness of the fist that impacted on the very spot where the bone underneath is sharpest. There are marks high up on Casey's arms, too, dark buds in clusters where the bastards held him while they beat him. Zeke grits his teeth and closes his eyes, tasting murder in his mouth, and the bitter knowledge of how many times he'd known this was happening, how many times they'd all known, and nobody thought it worth caring about.

When he opens his eyes, he sees Casey has closed his and turned his face away. _Stop thinking,_ he tells himself savagely. _Just be here._ He shoves the horror far into the back of his mind, locks it down where he won’t feel it, or any of the other thoughts that crowd around it. There’s no time for that now, and Zeke wouldn’t indulge it even if there were. One look at Casey’s strained face, his pressed lips, and he knows it wouldn’t be welcome. The last thing Casey wants is to be pitied. He’d curse and probably spit in Zeke’s face if he knew what he was thinking, with a strength beyond anything Zeke has ever had to summon. _Alright, then, no pity. Not a single fucking tear. But I’ll be goddamned if I let you think you’re alone in this._

“I _am_ alone,” Casey answers, just as if the words had actually been spoken. Zeke flinches at how easily Casey reads him, but it doesn’t really surprise him. Casey could hardly be inexperienced at recognizing what he'd seen in Zeke's face. He’s probably been seething at it his whole life even as he’s wished that someone – _anyone_ – would reach out and help him. But that wish likely died a long time ago, leaving him resigned to his fate of battered body and raging heart.

“No, you’re not,” Zeke replies, and feels anger himself at the way Casey narrows his eyes and turns his head away again; the _yeah, right_ might as well have been a shout from that sneering mouth. Zeke takes hold of his face and turns it back. “You’re _not._ You may be alone out there, but not here.” He kisses him, and shoves his knee between Casey’s thighs, pushing them apart, sliding up close to him, right up against his body. Zeke's arms cage Casey fiercely, and he pulls on his hair to bring their mouths together. There’s no tenderness in his movements, nothing gentle, because Casey doesn’t want it. He wants to escape, forget, drown in something that’ll make the pain and humiliation small and unimportant. Zeke doesn’t know if he can do that, but he’s sure as shit going to try.

He rolls onto his back, pulling Casey on top of him, and kisses him again, feeling the inside of his lip cut by the edges of his own teeth. Casey’s getting hard against his abdomen, and Zeke pushes up against him. He tastes blood in his mouth as Casey suddenly seems to catch fire, grabbing his wrists and pushing them down into the mattress on either side. Zeke lets him take over, tipping his head back and straining against the strong grip that had so surprised him when he first felt it. His voice breaks when Casey moves so his dick is sliding against Zeke’s, the sound loud in his own ears to match the force of the sensation. “Oh, _fuck._ Casey, god _aah…”_ he gasps.

“Shut up,” Casey hisses, and covers Zeke’s mouth with his own. Zeke takes the kiss, hungry, sucking Casey’s tongue, then slams his head back again and yells. “Yeah,” Casey half-sings, “yeah, that’s it, good, yeah.” He loosens his grip on Zeke’s right hand and brings it between them. He leans up and moves it to wrap around both their shafts, then puts his own hand over it to close the grip. “There,” he gasps, “do it. Make us both fucking come, do it. Go.” Then he takes Zeke’s mouth again, eating the noises they make together as their joined hands begin pulling and stroking. He lets go of Zeke’s other wrist and pushes up to thrust into the linked grip. Zeke watches as, with just a few quick, hard thrusts and a strangled shout, Casey comes onto his belly and over his hand. He leans down, his open mouth an inch from Zeke’s begging lips, and nearly makes him come just by murmuring his name in a weak, slippery voice. After a long moment, he kisses Zeke’s jaw and begins running his mouth downward, his still-gasping breath sending little icy shivers along the oversensitive skin. His mouth makes those odd little movements Zeke has wondered about before, then he licks his lips a few times. Suddenly Zeke realizes what he’s doing – he’s _stretching his lips,_ getting them ready, and once again he's blindsided by another way he's been wrong about Casey.

Then every possible thought is swamped by the sensation of that warm wet mouth jamming down over his dick as far as it can in one go. Zeke nearly shrieks, and takes hold of Casey’s hair in both hands as he moves to thrust into his mouth. With even fewer thrusts than Casey, he comes hard, seeing the brilliant eyes open and pin him with shards of blue. The aftermath shakes him, and when he falls back with a gasp, Casey moves up to lick lightly at his lips, drinking in his slowly calming breath.

“You can’t help me, Zeke,” he whispers. Zeke grows still, alert, listening. “Not ever. You can’t stop them, you can’t step in. You know you can’t.” He sets a hand over Zeke’s mouth when he opens it to answer. “It would only make things worse, ten times over. _They’d know._ They’d figure it out.” He closes his eyes then, and Zeke feels the echo of what Casey is seeing behind his closed lids. _He’s right,_ Zeke thinks, _all I would do is put the jackals on his scent, even worse than now. One way or another, they’d tear him apart._ He looks down over Casey’s body, over the translucent skin with its tragic garland, like wine-colored flowers or the corpses of Japanese maple leaves, if such beautiful things could carry such cruelty, and feels a blast of emotion so intense he can’t answer. His face must be registering something, though, because Casey kisses his eyelids, then rests their foreheads together. Zeke gives a shaky sigh, and locks that emotion away as well, never to be acknowledged, never to be felt. He struggles to regain his equilibrium, his detachment – his distance. _It’s what he wants,_ Zeke tells himself. _You’ve got no choice. It’s what he wants._

 

Casey lies quiet in the gathering dark, watching his lover sleep. He wants to touch him, wants to wake him up and have him again, but he lies still, looking at Zeke in the fading light, photographing him in his mind. White melting into gray by degrees, the long lines of his long frame, slight impression of ribs like a ladder up his torso. The underside of his jaw, his face turned up and away, a forearm folded over his eyes. The bright line of light reflecting off the ring on his hand, resting on his chest. The dark spikes of his hair, that fucking hair that proclaims without a doubt that Zeke Tyler Does Not Give A Shit. Casey smiles and looks over at the clock. Six thirty. He decides to walk home, it’s not that far and he needs to clear his head and think.

Dressing quietly and quickly with only a wince as he pulls on his jeans, he crouches on the ground to slide his sneakers back on, and pauses then to look once more at what he can see of Zeke’s sleeping face. He sees the façade with clear eyes now, sees how tenuous is Zeke’s hold on the shape of his own life, and how careful he’ll have to be not to knock him off balance. _Don’t try to stop them, Zeke. Don’t ever try. Just take me in when the storm comes. Be my secret._ That’s the only way to keep this together, to keep it going until it inevitably falls apart: as Casey is Zeke’s secret treasure, so will Zeke be his secret shelter. No one else will know, not ever, that he’s no longer naked in the storm.

Casey slips away, deciding as he closes the front door that it’s time to get his camera out again. It’s been too long, and Zeke is too beautiful, and he wants none of this to slip away and be forgotten.

.


End file.
